Malloy Moves to Narrow Gap Between Rich and Poor in Connecticut Schools

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Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut delivering his budget address to state lawmakers in Hartford on Wednesday. Mr. Malloy proposed changing the way the state finances its schools.CreditJessica Hill/Associated Press

In Connecticut, there is a vast gulf between the quality of education in the state’s wealthy school districts and those where families are poor.

On Wednesday, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, proposed sweeping changes to how the state finances education in an effort to narrow that gap, shifting money from most municipalities to focus on a few with high rates of poverty.

The proposal, part of the governor’s biennial budget, was intended, in part, to answer a ruling last year by a State Superior Court judge in Hartford who found that Connecticut was “defaulting on its constitutional duty” to give all students an adequate education.

The judge, Thomas Moukawsher, ordered the state to revamp the way it funds its schools and nearly every other major aspect of the school system, including graduation requirements and special education programs.

The case is under appeal, putting Judge Moukawsher’s orders on hold. Nonetheless, Mr. Malloy said on Wednesday that, broadly speaking, he agreed with the decision and that it would be better for the state to “design and take our own medicine” rather than leave it to the courts.

“A lot of it is about education,” Mr. Malloy said of his budget proposal in an interview, “and rectifying what Connecticut has done to itself over a long period of time, which is to not properly support pockets of poverty in urban environments and some small towns. So we’re seizing the moment to rectify that situation.”

Under the governor’s proposed spending plan, a new school funding formula would take into account how many students a district actually has. In the past, if a school district’s population shrank, its budget did not, nor would funding necessarily increase for a district that added students, Mr. Malloy’s office said.

The new formula would also change how the state measures student poverty, using eligibility for a state children’s health insurance program instead of whether students qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. The governor’s office said the new measure would capture a larger number of poor students.

Mr. Malloy also proposed shifting one-third of the cost of teacher pensions from the state to local governments. That would relieve the state of about $400 million it now spends each year.

Taken together, the changes that Mr. Malloy offered on Wednesday would mean a loss of state funds, including money for education, for 138 Connecticut municipalities. Funding would increase for 31 cities and towns, although some of the increases would be modest. Sprague, a town in the southeast section of the state, would receive the smallest increase — just $5,800 in the next fiscal year.

Increases of around $10 million or more would go to 11 municipalities. Hartford would get the largest increase, more than $47 million, followed by Waterbury, which would receive a $43 million increase. Both cities have a substantial number of poor families.

The governor’s proposal is a starting point in negotiations that are expected to stretch on for months. Still, Toni Jones, the school superintendent in Fairfield, which would lose $7.6 million in the next fiscal year under the plan, was shaken by the prospect of the cuts.

“The numbers they’re talking about are staggering,” she said. “To run a school system, you have to have teachers for the children, and you have to have support staff, and you have to feed the children, and you have to run buses. They are complex organizations, and you can’t just go and say we’re not going to do X, Y and Z. You can’t just go cutting things up.”

In his ruling last year, part of a long running case called Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell, Judge Moukawsher found major failings in the state education system, but he did not find that the state was spending too little money on schools. And Mr. Malloy, citing a period of slow economic growth in Connecticut, did not propose to significantly raise the amount the state would spend on education.

James J. Finley Jr., principal consultant to the Connecticut Coalition, said his group disagreed with that portion of the judge’s ruling and with Mr. Malloy’s proposal on school financing, which Mr. Finley said was “redistributing slices within the existing pie.”

The governor, he said, “is following a Robin Hood approach, taking from those he perceives of as rich and reallocating dollars from them to the poor.”

Mr. Malloy said that comment was “missing the point.” He said the focus of the Connecticut Coalition case was on students who live in poor areas, where local property taxes are insufficient to pay for an adequate education.

“We are taking care of that,” he said. “I can’t make a cloudy day sunny, but I can rectify that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Malloy Moves to Narrow Gap Between Connecticut’s Rich and Poor School Districts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe